JUDITH C.

HERMAN '

Department of Anthropology
Hunter College, CUNY
New York, NY 10021

Bad Hair Days in the Paleolithic:

Modern (Re)Constructions of the Cave Man
Although we have never seen Paleolithic humans in the flesh, we recognize them immediately in illustrations, art, cartoons, and museum displays. The familiar iconography of the "Cave Man" often depicts our early human ancestors with
longish, unkempt hair. However, this conventionalized image is not congruent with available archaeological data on the
appearance of Upper Paleolithic humans. The lengthy iconographic history of representations of our prehistoric humans is
rather a palimpsest of beliefs about the origins of humans, "natural man," human nature, primitive humans, and the savage
"Other": a history of discourses about human evolution, human language, and the place of humans in the natural world.
These images are traced in their anthropological, evolutionary, and philosophical contexts from medieval art through recent scientific illustrations, art, cartoons, and murals, and their influence on the scientific interpretation of our ancestors is
assessed. [Cave Man, Paleolithic, evolution, primitive, illustration]

rom his first "scientific" appearance in 1873 (Figure 1), the "Cave Man"2 seems utterly familiar. Although he has never been seen in the flesh, we instantly recognize him in illustrations, art, films, cartoons,
and museum displays. His place in human evolutionary
time is signaled by several attributes, most of which appear
concurrently: he is found in or in front of caves, or in a wild
setting confronting savage beasts. He is equipped with
(and archaeologically best identified by) stone, wooden, or
bone implements, usually associated with hunting or combat. In scientific illustration, he is often quite serious in demeanor, as seems to befit the arduous circumstances of his
life. He is attired in fur, which is often draped in ways that
shield the wearer from neither the weather nor untoward
gazes. Accessories, when they exist, consist of bone, antler, or claw jewelry. His hair is particularly noteworthy: he
sports shoulder-length or longer, often unstyled and even
unkempt, hair on his head and frequently is bearded. Significant body hair is often depicted.
This image is so familiar to us that it is difficult to think
of Paleolithic3 humans as looking any other way. And yet
our actual referents for this image are extremely scarce or
are belied by the extant paleoarchaeological record. Certainly many paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, physical
anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists in the latter
part of this century have contended that Upper Paleolithic
humans were "just like us." Conversely, the image of the
Cave Man is notably data-independent, and is, I suggest,
almost entirely based on a specific visual construct that has
remained remarkably stable for three millennia and more.

What then accounts for the persistence of this counter-image that powerfully negates paleoanthropological reality?
Visual conventions or stereotypes provide both artist
and audience with a parsimonious mode of expression: a
world of meaning through a single image. Conventions immediately, simply, and effortlessly convey the elements of
a situation or story so that we can properly "read" it The
economics of popular images, such as cartoons, force reliance on visual shorthand, on a common iconographic vocabulary, in order to communicate with an audience. Without this shorthand we would not be in on the joke. But
although conventions appear en face to simplify and clarify, they contain complex and often contradictory messages. Readings of images are psychologically, culturally,
and socially conditioned and may bear only a contingent
relationship to reality.
Some images seem to take on a life of their own, to persist
over long stretches of time. These images endure because
they readily sustain polyvalent, mutable readings, because
they are psychologically potent projections, and because they
provide visual support for histories and narratives. They also
may be used to create and maintain boundaries. In scientific
and popular discourse, visual imagery is particularly important, for, as Myers (1988.231) has argued, "the iconography
of a science is more likely to have an impact on the public
than the words or mathematics, which may be incomprehensible to them" (see, for example, Moser 1992; Myers 1988;
Rudwick 1976, 1988, 1992 on the relationship between the
visualization of scientific data and the effects of that visualization on the science itself and on its audience).

American Anthropologist ]01(2):288-304. Copyright 1999, American Anthropological Association

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Figure 1. Harpers Weekly, XVII(864):617, July 19, 1873.

The distinction between the scientific and popular Cave

Man has diverged only recently. However, the shaggy,
grunting Cave Man, who fights dinosaurs, talks "rock,"
and woos prehistoric-bikini-clad Cave Women with a club,
is firmly in place, and it is easy to see why. To take one medium as an example, in this century the public has been
saturated with over 150 Cave Man films, animated cartoons, and television shows, beginning with the 1912 D. W.
Griffith silent, Man's Genesis. These films are a sexy mix
of beefcake, cheesecake, and monsters and encompass almost all film genres, from comedy to horror^
These filmed images are supported and reified by other
popular media. For example, Griffith's films, Man s Genesis and its 1913 sequel, Brute Force, were based on the
1897 ur-Cave Man novel The Story ofAb, by Stanley Waterloo (Wagenknecht and Slide 1975:10). Griffith also
used Jack London's illustrated 1907 novel, Before Adam
which, in turn, was alleged to be a plagiarization of Waterloo's work (Kingman 1979:118; Tavernier-Courbin 1983:
13). The ill-received Dairy] Hannah film, The Clan of the

Cave Bear, was based on the wildly successful first novel

of the same name in Jean Auel's popular series, Earth's
Children (with more books to come). And of course, dinosaurs and Cave Men mix in the funnies: viz. Alley Oop
(who, since 1933, has "a chauffeur that's a genuine dinosaur"5), B.C. (since 1958), the Flintstones (since 1960),
and thousands of other cartoons.
These examples show that while the Cave Man is visualized stereotypically, both in scientific and popular culture, he is read in many different ways. These readings, as I
will try to show, reflect our views of ourselves in terms of
our place in nature, our origins, and perhaps our destiny.
The Cave Man's long, polemical pedigree is a product of
centuries of debate about the origins of humans, "natural
man," human nature, and primitive humans and comprises
discourses about human evolution, human language, and
the place of humans in the natural world.6
Certainly this essay is not the first attempt to deconstruct
the Western image of the Cave Man or the "primitive" and
point out how the concept is more a reflection of Western

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notions than on-the-ground reality (see, e.g., Clifford

1988:189-214; Edwards 1992; Gombrich 1960; Kuper
1988; Lutz and Collins 1993; Moser 1992; Moser and
Gamble 1997; Price 1989; Raymond 1990; Stoczkowski
1990, 1997). However, the Cave Man differs from the
primitive in that he is invisible through the barrier of time,
simultaneously real and imagined, unexploitable, and
available for appropriation. His image is always a (reconstruction and an opportunity for fantasy. In this paper, I
shall attempt to interpret aspects of his iconographic history: his longish, wild hair and hairy body.
The Cave Man's hairiness is one of the elements of the
construction of an "imaginary prehistory" (Stoczkowski
1997:256), as identified in several recent analyses, notably
by Stoczkowski (1990, 1992, 1994, 1997; see also Moser
and Gamble 1997). This prehistory is composed of two
master narratives. One is the ascent of humans from their
animal origins to becoming "masters of nature." Lovejoy
and Boas ([1935] 1997; see also Panofsky 1972:40-41)
identify this as "hard primitivism," the ascent from a bestial state. Early humans in such works as Lucretius' first
century C.E. work, De rerum natura (Book V, 925-1010,
as quoted in Lovejoy and Boas [1935] 1997:225-228), are
depicted as hairy, muscular hunters, that is, as Cave Men.
As Stoczkowski (1990:115-120,1997:253) notes, this motif was picked up and embroidered by the philosophes of
the Enlightenment. In the alternate "soft primitivism" narrative (Lovejoy and Boas [1935] 1997:23-102), humans
descend from a Golden Age to a degenerated state.
Stoczkowski (1997:256) contends that "this imaginary
prehistory continues to have a life of its own today only
through sheer apathy." However, I suggest that it is not
apathy that supports the visual iconography of the Cave
Man, but rather the powerful meanings behind the image
as well as an endless array of present and past cultural
icons that reinforce and reify its presence. The Cave Man
is, in part, a projection of the wild, untamed, uninhibited,
aggressive selfa projection, in fact, that explains that self
by historicizing its "uncivilized" elements. That is, the
Cave Man relieves the anxiety of the uncivilized parts of
oneself by projecting them outward and backwards in time.
The Cave Man can be both debased and noble, expressing
nostalgia for our noble animal nature, as well as the negation of civilized society.
In this essay, I shall attempt to unpack one element used
in the construction of the Cave Man image, focusing on
one of the Cave Man's most consistent and meaningful attributes: his hair. I first consider some of the psychological
and anthropological aspects of hair itself and its use as a
marker for the Cave Man. Next, I review some of the extant Paleolithic data from mobilary art, wall engravings,
and paintings on self-representations of early humans, including hairstyles. I then discuss selected aspects of the
iconographic history of two of the images of the hairy
Cave Man, from the imagery of the "Wild Man" in medie-

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val art through the evolutionary models of the nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries. I conclude with some reflections on how the image shapes our thinking about our prehistoric ancestors and ourselves.

Hair as Sign and Symbol

Hair, like other parts of the human body, is laden with psychological, social, philosophical, and emotional meaning
(e.g., Eilberg-Schwartz and Doniger 1995; Levine 1995).
However, hair differs from other parts of the body in several
ways. It can be readily altered without physical pain as often
as desired; it regenerates after having been altered; and it is
visible at a social distance (Wobst 1977). Hair is the body's
most accessible site for grooming, decoration, and symbolic
marking; it is difficult to imagine that it would not have appeared so to Middle and Upper Paleolithic humans, as it has
to those who have followed (Naguib 1990). The symbolism
of hair is overdetermined; that is, it has multiple meanings,
both personal and public, even within a single context (e.g.,
de Vries 1974; Eilberg-Schwartz 1995; Hallpike 1969;
Hershman 1974; Leach 1958).
Given a myriad of potential hairstyles (with their multivalent meanings), the individual artists7 considered in this
essay portray the Cave Man almost monotypically as wildhaired and hairy. Why should this convention prevail, and
what does it mean? Modem scientific illustrators often
give him a "noncoiffure" (Grunwald 1993:51) in an attempt to construct an "unmarked" or "scientifically neutral" Cave Man. That is, the argument goes, since we really
don't know, for any particular place and time, how prehistoric humans wore their hair, their hair is left unstyled and
messy rather than topknotted or braided, for example. If
they are given a coiffure, then we commit ourselves to a
depiction of our ancestors that might be inaccurate or
prejudicial; certainly it is non-verifiable. But this "unmarked" hair, as I shall attempt to show in this paper, is not
neutral, but rather a visual signifier for an entire set of beliefs about our ancestors, placing them in the category of
Not Us, or at least Not Quite Us.
The answers to these questions reside, I believe, in the
way in which the Cave Man's body acts as the primary site
for delineating his evolutionary position and condition.
While facial and body hair are ancient and important markers of maleness, the application of these markers to Cave
Men transcends issues of gender identification. The archaeological data suggest that the Cave Man can control
the world around him to the extent of making tools, making
art, and wearing clothing. But his hairiness subverts his humanity; it implies that he cannot master his own body, cannot tame its nature, cannot sever himself from the world of
animals. The Cave Man is located in Nature, marked as a
primitive, and placed below modem humans on the ladder
of evolution (read Great Chain of Being), exactly as, for
example, Krao, the hairy girl, was "scientifically" proposed

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as the "Missing Link" and shown at exhibitions in the late

nineteenth century (Poignant 1992:51; see also Cook 1996;
Fiedler 1978; Mitchell 1979; Rothfels 1996; Semonin
1996).
The association of wild hair, a hairy body, and a "natural" state frequently occurs cross-culturally and diachronically. The wild aspect of naturalness carries with it connotations of primitivism, of animal-like behavior, of standing
outside of civilization, of power, of lawlessness, of amorality, of sexual abandon, of perversion, of madness, just as
the natural world can be unchecked, dangerous, unpredictable, and powerful (de Vries 1974:21-23; see also
Bernheimer [1952] 1970:10). This is not surprising, given
both our membership in the animal kingdom and the fact
that the hairy body is associated with sexuality, as body
hair appears during puberty. Hallpike (1969:261) neatly
summarizes it thus: "there is considerable evidence in fact
for an association of 'outside society equals hairiness
equals animality'." In Western society, the literary and artistic tradition extends from the great Mesopotamian hero
Enkidu through the Bible8 to our present day.
As we view the hairy body of the Cave Man, the Wild
Man, we imagine we see something essential; as hair
comes from inside the body, it can be thought to express
something fundamental about the inner nature of the being
from whence it comes. This concept is clarified if we think
of the opposite case: a normally hairy, powerful animal
rendered hairless. Think of a hairless wolf or gorilla; its
power seems considerably diminished. Hairlessness recalls
the fetal, utterly dependent state. Compare the relatively
hairless domestic pig with its dangerous cousin, the hairy
wild boar.9 Thus wild hair is the visual synecdoche par excellence for the primitivism, the power, and the natural
state of the image of the Cave Man.
Very hairy, wild-haired humans like Krao are, in reality,
quite unusual. Clinically, Krao's appearance may have been
due to hormonal imbalances, or to the much rarer acquired or
generalized genetic hypertrichoses, which result in hair
growth all over the body (often to a greater degree than in
apes). Scientists have recently identified the gene responsible
for congenital generalized hypertrichosis, a "rare mutation
[that] might have restored a function that was reduced or extinguished during human evolution, causing the loss of facial
hair. Such back mutations are called 'atavistic' as they are
causally associated with the partial reappearance of an ancestral phenotype" (Figurea et al. 1995:206). Hypertrichoses
may involve physical deformities and mental retardation;
they may also run in families.
While there is no direct evidence for the point in human
evolution at which thick pelage was lost, the subject has
been debated since Darwin ([1871]1981:ii, 281-286). Alison Jolly makes the important point that all known nonhuman primates have neat hair; grooming involves cleaning coats and the promotion of social bonding, not hair

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styling. Human hair, in contrast, requires styling if it is not

to be tangled and disorderly (personal communication,
1999). Some scholars have hypothesized that loss of functional body hair is one of a complex series of important
early hominid thermoregulatory system adaptations to the
physical requirements for survival in open savannah environments, and for "persistence hunting."10 While these
studies place the loss of a thick coat in the Lower Paleolithic, we have a terminus ante quern in the Upper Paleolithic, since images of humans from that period seem to
have hair distributions resembling that of present-day humans. Thus, the trope of the hairy Cave Man has everything to do with the reading that has historically been given
to cases of extreme hirsutism and hypertrichoses and little
to do with evolutionary fact. Individuals suffering from
these conditions have been immediately and unequivocally
linked with animals: "generalized hypertrichoses of genetic cause are often congenital and may give rise to such a
striking phenotype that affected subjects have been displayed in circuses as 'hair men', 'dog men', 'human Skye
terrier', 'ape men', 'human werewolf or 'Homo silvestris'"
(Figurea et al. 1995:202). While these cases are extremely
rare, they support the legends of elusive, animal-esque humans, from Sasquatch to werewolves to the Wild Man.
However, there is a difference between assigning wild hair
to a few individuals and assigning it to a whole species. We
do have some evidence for the appearance of our ancestors,
and to this I now turn.

Hair in the Middle and Late Paleolithic:

The Archaeological Evidence
How did Cave Men actually look? The answer to this
question first requires some unbundling, as the historical
convention often conflates Middle Paleolithic hominids
(the European variety of which are familiarly called Neanderthals) with those of the Upper Paleolithic (early modem
humans, some of whom were formerly termed Cro-Magnon)
into one great "Stone Age." In the past century and a half,
we have had at our disposal three sources of data on Middle and Upper Paleolithic humans: (1) the skeletal remains,
(2) the material artifacts, and, (3) for the Upper Paleolithic,
images of humans produced by Upper Paleolithic humans.
There are no extant images of Neanderthals produced by
the Neanderthals themselves.
The skeletal remains yield a great deal of information
about appearance in terms of stature, muscle mass, sex,
diet, age, and health, but do not in any way indicate how an
individual wore his or her hair, or dressed, or wore tattoos,
nor do these data have anything to add about skin or hair
color. So the first category allows us to construct skeletons,
to pose them in groups, to show young and old, male and
female; it does not provide us with skin or hair. The
original Neanderthal discovery, in 1856, consisted of a
partial skull with thick browridges, thighbones, part of a

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pelvis, ribs, and arm and shoulder bones (Trinkaus and

Shipman 1994:4). By 1873, only four more bones had been
added to the Neanderthal corpus: the Gilbraltar skull (with
a face) from 1848, recognized as Neanderthal in 1864
(Tnnkaus and Shipman 1994:89); and a group from La
Naulette, Belgium, found in 1866, which consisted of a
lower jaw, ulna, and metacarpal (Trinkaus and Shipman
1994:102-3). These few bones were used to construct the
Harper's Weekly Neandertal cum Cave Man (see Figure 1).
The second category of data, material remains, enriches
our view of the past. We can say much more about lifeways: dwellings, tools, settlement patterns, diet, activities.
We may infer social behavior from these data, and we can
add to our knowledge of physical appearance through the
documentation of items of personal adornment, such as accessories, fastenings, combs, needles, and paints. However, we do not have direct evidence of hairdos, skin, or
clothing. We might surmise that the Neanderthals, living as
they did in a severe glacial period, had little opportunity or
motivation to groom their hair, but this is conjecture not
specifically grounded in the data.
The third category of data, visual representation, is most
useful here. There are several hundred extant figural representations from Upper Paleolithic contexts, mostly of
women. We have absolutely no way of judging what the
creators of these images intended; for example, we cannot
even say if these representations are naturalistic portrayals
of contemporary humans, or if they were recorded because
the subjects were typical or because they were exceptional.
However, we do know that the images of animals produced
by Upper Paleolithic humans are realistic representations,
and we might infer that at least some of the representations
of humans are also naturalistic. If we look specifically at
head hair, we can see that it is styled. The images most familiar to us are the so-called "Venus figurines." While
these small statues of women depict parts of bodies in
some detail, they often do not apply the same amount of attention to extremities, including the hands, feet, and head.
However, when there is some detail in the head, we often
see hairdos. The most famous Venus figurine, the Venus of
Willendorf (Figure 2), seems to be wearing a hairnet or
some kind of elaborate hairdo, and the Venus of Brassempouy (Figure 3) has a clearly defined shoulder-length hairstyle. Other Venus figurines have dressed, or at least tamed,
hair. Archaeologists have argued that there are local
"styles" of Venus figurines; these local styles reflect both
differences in local artistic traditions and may also reflect
differences in local hairdos and other aspects of personal
adornment (Gvozdover 1989a, 1989b). However, body
hair (excluding that from the pubic area) is not represented
on female figures (Duhard 1993:166-167). There are
fewer representations of men in which hair styles can be
observed. Their hairstyles are less elaborate than those of
the women. Very few have facial hair, and none are represented with body hair (Duhard 1993:167).

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1999

Figure 2. "Venus of Willendorf." Photo courtesy of Musee de

l'Homme. Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle. Pans.

If we can make the not unreasonable leap from Upper

Paleolithic art to Upper Paleolithic behavior, the data
strongly suggest that Upper Paleolithic humans were attentive to hair and that they styled it." It is difficult to make
any case for the meaning of hairstyles, as a personal statement, as a reflection of group membership, etc.; for my
purposes here, it is enough to say that hair was attended to
by Upper Paleolithic humans.
This observation clarifies the disjunction between what
we know of Upper Paleolithic humans and the image of the
hairy Cave Man. Thus, while most of the extant data for the
Upper Paleolithic do not suggest wild hair, the lack of data
for the Middle Paleolithic does not require its insertion.
From this perspective, the total absence of evidence for
Neanderthal appearance turns into an opportunity for free-

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Figure 3. Head of a woman called "La Dame de Brassempouy.''

Photo courtesy of St-Germain-en-Laye, Antiquites Nationales.
Photo RMN-J.G. Berizzi. Persons wishing to photocopy or otherwise reproduce this material must contact the permissions department
at St-Germain-en-Laye.

floating fantasies; it is therefore especially interesting that

this blank in our data is filled in with the idea/image of the
Cave Man. Certainly, as Moser (1992; see also Stringer
and Gamble 1993:18-33) has shown, the lower the place
of Neanderthals in the Great Chain of Being, the hairier
and more ape-like they are. But even when they are represented at their best, as in the American Museum of Natural
History's new Hall of Human Biology and Evolution (see
below), they are nevertheless still represented as hairy men.

Two Hairy Men: A Visual History

Let us examine the images of two types of hairy men:
the Cave Man and an image that I propose as one of the
progenitors of the Cave Man. Our by now familiar Cave

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293

Man is represented by the Neanderthal male in the diorama

in the American Museum of Natural History s Hall of Human Biology and Evolution (Figure 4).12 Certainly this Neanderthal is not the stooped brutal caveman depicted in a
century's worth of images (Moser 1992; Stringer and
Gamble 1993). Indeed, the diorama reflects the most recent
data about Neanderthals and expresses serious scientific
assumptions about Neanderthal cognitive abilities as well
as living conditions. But the diorama also appears to employ some standard Cave Man tropes and so is useful in
unpacking some of the assumptions going into the conventional Cave Man image.
We may understand this modem reconstruction by going back to an older, seemingly unrelated image. In a Late
Medieval illumination attributed to Jean Bourdichon,
Tours, ca. 1500 (Figure 5), a Wild family is grouped in
front of a cave in the woods, presumably somewhere in
France. The Wild (and rather mild) paterfamilias is standing next to his seated wife and child. He is naked, hairy,
and somewhat wild-haired. He holds a long wooden staff.
A medieval castle is visible in the background. In fact, the
castle is perhaps our only direct indication that this is not
another depiction of prehistoric life (the image also clearly
refers to the Holy Family).
So far, we have a simple visual parallel between two images, from which some straightforward comparisons may
be made; indeed, the diligent observer could find many
such comparanda. When the representations are juxtaposed, they are strikingly similar. In each, the man has wild
hair and beard, holds a wooden implement, and is dressed
either in a crude animal skin or his own hairy pelt. The almost inevitable fur drape may be seen as a substitute for
the Wild Man's/Cave Man's hairy skin. Indeed, they appear in a near-inverse relationship; the less body hair on the
Wild Man or Cave Man, the more he is likely to be in furs.
The fur associates these figures with their animal natures
and also implies that the association is mutable, capable of
evolution. As the fur drape can be transformed into clothing, the Wild Man or Cave Man can be civilized. However,
both the Wild Man and Cave Man are quite apart from organized society, the former by space, the latter by time.
Now we may ask if these images owe their similarity to independent invention, or whether there is some genetic link
between them.
The Wild Man, typified by the one we see in Bourdichon's
painting, is, I suggest, the ur-image of the hairy Cave Man.
He has all of the familiar Cave Man physical attributes and
props: the wild hair, the hairy coat, the club, the cave, and,
like the Cave Man, he is a figure just out of sight. The Wild
Man embodies the same debates about humans1 place in
nature that, in a later time, rage about the Cave Man. However, the Wild Man is not an evolutionary figure, but rather
a theological one: "the [Wild Man] had been brought to its
condition by loss of mind, by upbringing among beasts, or

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Figure 4. Neanderthal Diorama. Hall of Human Biology and Evolution, American Museum of Natural History, New York, 1993. Nee. no.
338383. Photo by Finnin. Chesek, Beckett. Courtesy Department of Library Services, American Museum of Natural History.

by outrageous hardships.
The status of Wild Man was
thus reached not by a gradual ascent from the brute, but by
a descent" (Bemheimer [1952] 1970:8; see also Bartra
1994; Dudley and Novak 1972; Husband 1980; White
1972).
Over time, the significance of the Wild Man to European society changes, especially after the great age of exploration. He accrues a variety of meanings and associations. He is celebrated from the margins of manuscripts
(Camille 1992:109) to the manuscripts themselves, including The Faerie Queene and The Tempest. He is found in
song, theater, folktales, and art. Indeed, the figure and character of the Wild Man was widely disseminated throughout
medieval and Renaissance Europe. He is a familiar, ungodly figure, a bogeyman to frighten children, a symbol of
unfettered desires and cruel savagery. As a local European,
he becomes more benigna more tender-locked "Noble
Savage," in contradistinction to the real "savages" discovered outside of Europe. But he never wholly disappears,
and the association between hairiness and wildness he embodies is preserved and transferred wholly to the Cave
Mart.

His impact is perhaps most clearly and ironically shown

in the early encounters between Native Americans and
Europeans. The Europeans arriving on the shores of the
New World were thoroughly acquainted with the iconography of the Wild Man and the meanings attached thereto.
Imagine their surprise when they first encountered Native
Americans. The Native Americans were, in the first place,
neither hairy nor necessarily wild-haired, and, in fact, often
had elaborately dressed hair. The Europeans were shocked
by this lack of hair, and accordingly illustrated male Native
Americans with long, flowing beards (Figure 6; Colin
1987; Sturtevant 1976); indeed, verbal reports of hairy Native Americans persist into the eighteenth century, as do
surprised or admonitory reports saying that the Native
Americans were not hairy at all (Dickason 1977:22). In the
most delicious of ironies, the Native Americans, who detested body hair and plucked it from their bodies, were in
turn shocked by the hairy Europeans. The Native Americans, it seems, had a hairy Wild Man of their own, called
Sasquatch (Dickason 1977:22). Thus, both the hairy Europeans and the hairless Amerindians have a hairy Wild Man
in their forests, and each is repelled by the Other.

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Figure 5. "Etat de sauvage." Attributed to Jean Bourdichon (Tours,

ca. 1457-1521), France, about 1500. Tempera on vellum. Miniatures
90-93. Photo courtesy of Ecole Nationale Superieure des BeauxArts. Bibliotheque, Paris. Persons wishing to photocopy or otherwise
reproduce this material must contact the permissions department at
Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. Bibliotheque, Paris.

The above example is instructive in several ways. First,

it emphasizes the pervasiveness, the palpable force of the
image of the hairy Wild Man, to the point where its insistence denies reality. Second, it underlines the fact that a
hairy Wild Man is not an exclusively Western invention,
and that the association of hairiness and animality is quite
widespread. Indeed, an almost exact parallel is found in accounts by the Chinese of their encounters with European
missionaries (Dikotter 1998:52-54). While the genetic and
somatic conditions causing excess hairiness may arise anywhere, they seem, interestingly, to be read in similar
waysas beings who are somewhere between animal/nature and human/animal.13 Many societies create hairy Others, and, while outside the scope of this essay, it would be
edifying to identify this reading cross-culturally and
diachronically. For example, hairy, often fearsome wild
men and monsters abound, from China (Dikotter 1998),
South Africa (Kuper 1987:171), and, as we have seen, the
New World.'4 Legends of a mysterious Wild Man are also
found cross-culturally: the Yeti (Nepal and China), the
Abominable Snowman (Siberia), the Almas (Mongolia),

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295

and Sasquatch (North America) (see Shackley 1983 for a

summary and a connection to the disappearance of the Neanderthal). Finally, the example provides a point of entry
into the larger debates about primitivism, savagery, and
evolution, from which we will see the hairy Wild Man
emerge, (reConstructed, as the Cave Man.
The questions Europeans asked about Native Americans
and other OthersWere they entirely human? Did they
possess a soul? Can they be redeemed? Did they really
speak a language?were those asked about the Wild Man.
These questions became particularly urgent with the discoveries of non-European humans. How to place them in
relation to the "civilized" humans of Europe? To vastly
oversimplify, those trying to answer these questions were
constrained by the Bible and by Aristotle. As life on earth
began with the Biblical Creation, the living things that
were created then exist today. Thus, humans had no prehistory. On the other hand, all living things had to fit into the
Aristotelian Great Chain of Being, which was a hierarchical classification with humans at the top. Some naturalists
filled the gap between animals and humans in that chain,
the "missing link," with newly discovered humans. Significantly, the Wild Man appears in that category, along
with the (naturally hairy) orangutan, in Linnaeus1 1758
edition of Systema Naturae (Greene 1959:184-187).
By the eighteenth century, the Wild Man is believed to
exist and to occupy a place between animals and humans in
the natural world. In these schemes, he is illustrated in a
Missing Link lineup, along with hairy apes and wild-looking "primitive" humans. It is important to mark that the
visual copula of these very different creatures-one imaginary, one non-human, and one humanis hair. Their hairiness implies their other primitive features: lack of morality,
lack of language, lack of civilization, lack of humanity.
They are the primitive Other, one notch below humans in
the Great Chain of Being. When that chain becomes an
evolutionary scheme, these Others appear in one guise as
the Cave Man, who arrives in the nineteenth century to illustrate the debates arising from Darwinian evolution and
the first discoveries of human fossils.
After the discovery of the remains of Homo sapiens
neanderthalensis in 1856 and the publication of Darwin1 s
The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection in
1859, the Cave Man emerges as an independent figure. He
now occupies a temporal, evolutionary niche. His iconography is notably an off-the-shelf version of the Wild
Manthe Missing Linkused by nineteenth-century artists to illustrate Stone Age life. The hairy Wild Man, reconstructed as the Cave Man, becomes the standard trope
for the Cave Man for three important reasons. First, the
Cave Man is familiar. He has been loitering in the correct
position in the Great Chain of Being for centuries. He
seems so natural that one has trouble imagining our ancestors as anything else. Secondly, the producers of the image,

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!
1
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._
,
_...,
,
l....alfon1 ttb0M'l'-lwunwltf<ff'ltn l>-ttPw;mfuS>(twmx>(im(jtlii4mwcmgtntfc&aiibf&tth. 2liKbbbm&itm^wtrmngef<cbtmn&b:u|lwfce&cltflirin.(bat4wb W ^

Figure 6. Anonymous. [Early German woodcut of a New World scene.] Woodcut, ca. 1505. Photo courtesy of the Spencer Collection, The New
York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation.

the artists, did not acknowledge the Cave Man's visual genealogy, but instead legitimized their work as Science. Accordingly, the consumers of the image thought they were
viewing Truth, not interpretation. Finally, in the age of mechanical reproduction, these illustrations were circulated
among the widest possible mass audience. Hairy Cave
Men filled the pages of magazines and newspapers and appeared in salons, fairs, and expositions.
We can see how this happened in a brief example from
nineteenth-century France. The emphasis on scientific accuracy in images of Cave Men coincides with a more general trend toward realism in art. Artists were attempting
what the art historian Linda Nochlin (1971:25) aptly terms
"genre paintings of history." While Realists confined
themselves to paintings of contemporary life, other French
Academic artists worked at the same time to create highly
influential15 paintings of history and prehistory. These
Academic paintings and sculptures were enormously
popular and were widely exhibited at the French Salons
and many of the great nineteenth-century exhibitions (Mainardi 1987, 1993). While this Academic art is generally ne-

glected today for its aesthetic and creative shortcomings, it

plays an important role in the history of illustration of the
Cave Man.
That France was one of the most important loci of Cave
Man art is not surprising. Many of the early and widely
publicized Paleolithic skeletal finds were made in France
and French scientists and scholars were heavily involved in
this work. An enthusiastic and fascinated public, enchanted
with their own culture, avidly demanded more and more
information. Further, the French Academic establishment
already had a tradition of genre paintings; the yearly Salons
were filled with historical scenes, as well as elaborate representations, in that blithely imperialist period, of exotic
and savage figures from all over the world. Finally, the
homme sauvage, the Wild Man, was a familiar figure to
French artists.
The work of the artist Femand Cormon (1845-1924)
serves to illustrate the way in which the Wild Man becomes the "scientific" Cave Man. Cormon was one of the
most prolific and influential painters of Stone Age humans.
His painting Cain, a variant on the usual Cain theme, based

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upon a poem (La Conscience) by Victor Hugo (Hugo

[1859] 1974:26-27), is seen in an impressively large (584 x
700 cm) painting that was exhibited at the Salon of 1880
(Mainardi [1993:94] notes that it got in by its sheer size
alone). The painting shows a hairy, ragged band of prehistoric figures on a forced and desperate march (Figure 7).
All of the iconographic traits of the Wild Man are floridly
evident. This portrayal won Cortnon the Legion of Honor
(Mainardi 1993:94); this award, as well as his other paintings of prehistoric subjects, made him a natural choice to
paint prehistoric humans on the walls of Paris's new
Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle.
These paintings, which depicted wild-haired Cave Men
in a variety of activities, influenced generations of scientists and scientific illustrators, as well as the public. Many
found Cormon's works persuasive not just because they
were dramatic and compelling narratives; after all, many of
that historical genre were equally appealing. It was that
Cormon's work bore the imprimatur of Science. He was
celebrated for his ethnographic, archaeological, and natural
history research (Michel 1898); thus his paintings were not
seen as mere artistic interpretations, and certainly not as
appropriations of the Wild Man, but instead as accurate
representations of human ancestors in imagined configurations.
This work provided a perfect visual accompaniment to
the verbal narratives of human evolution and fits well with
the more general trend toward realism in art. Cormon's
wild-haired Cave Men are indeed beings who are not quite
human, or not quite civilized, somewhere between the apes
and civilization. One cannot imagine beings who look like
Cormon's Cave Men being anything but uncivilized. They
appear as raw, crude blueprints for the modem humans
they will become. The Cave Man image drives the discourse of evolution, rather than the other way around. The
image is so powerful, so hard to dislodge because it is so
terribly familiaras much to Cormon as it is to us. As we
have seen, the "truth" of the Cave Man image is derived
from his Wild Man forebear and not from the archaeological record. Thus, the emendation of the bodies of our ancestors with the visual signifiers of the Wild Mannotably, his wild hairseems altogether inevitable, although it
is actually a narrowing of alternative interpretations of the
data.
The scientific Cave Man came to America through the
work of Charles R. Knight, the artist largely responsible for
the great and influential murals in the American Museum
of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum in
Chicago.16 His shaggy-haired Cave Men were wildly popular and widely influential (Figure 8).17 As noted above,
Cave Men have been staples of American popular culture
for the last century.
To summarize: the Cave Man's lineage extends back to
the ancient and hairy Wild Man. Artists of the nineteenth

BAD HAIR DAYS IN THE PALEOLITHIC

297

and twentieth centuries simply appropriated that readymade image, in part because the image is part of their artistic vocabulary. More importantly, the hairy Cave Man appears to look as a "missing link" should: his hairiness
places him somewhere between animals and modern humans, between animals and Civilization.

Implications
I have attempted to trace the image of the Cave Man
back to its roots, and to show that hair is a visual synecdoche for the nature and animality that connects the image
and its precursors. The Cave Man looks as he does because
he is a representation of our ideas about human nature and
human origins. His image is not necessarily based on scientific data, but is rather anchored in and entwined with
other tremendously puissant representations deriving from
pagan and Judeo-Christian traditions. We are readily convinced of the "truth" of Cave Man images because they
seem "natural" or familiar to us; in fact, they draw on a set
of conventionalized observations about the origins and
natural history of humans.
Hairstyles are a clue to where on the evolutionary tree an
artist or illustrator places his or her subject. Certainly a
thick coat of body hair and ungroomed head hair puts an
ancestor a great distance from modem humans (although
we have no data on when a hairy coat was lost), while most
Neanderthals have longer and untidier hair than Upper Paleolithic humans. Now these may be perfectly accurate
representations of our ancestors, but we have no data on
this subject until the Upper Paleolithic. Hair is our marker
of evolutionary position; the further away from our animal
origins, the more it is under control. (In many of the pictorial histories of humankind, later humans leave the Paleolithic behind, put on good Neolithic cloth coats,18 invent
headbands and pageboys, and settle down on their farms.)
So far, we have delineated some of the natural history of
the convention of the Cave Man and have examined the
significance of his hair. But why should this Cave Man
matter so to us? The Cave Man is a representation of our
ancestors; the fact of evolution forces us to acknowledge
that the Cave Man resides within each of us. He is our animal, primitive self, before the limits of society.
In one version, he is the Noble Savage, natural man before he was corrupted by civilization. He is romanticized as
a purely natural being, perhaps because
our fantasy of the noble savage represents a reality of our existence, it stands for our sense of something unhappily surrendered, the truth of the body, the truth of full sexuality, the
truth of open aggressiveness. Something, we know, must inevitably be surrendered for the sake of civilization; but the
"discontent" of civilization which Freud describes is our selfrecrimination at having surrendered too much. [Trilling
1974:18-19]

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Figure 7. Fernand Cormon. Cain, Salon of 1880. Photo courtesy of Musee d'Orsay, Paris. Photo RMN-00598767. Persons wishing to
photocopy or otherwise reproduce this material must contact the permissions department at the Musee d'Orsay, Pans.

In this sense, the Cave Man embodies a yearning for nature, for simplification. Things were simpler and more
natural in the Golden Age of the past, desires were unbridled, lusts were uninhibited, until we ruined it with Civilization. We hear the echo of the Noble Savage when we
think that those close to Nature are living a superior, natural life. As Joel Pfister (1997:183) has shown, for the white
middle and upper classes between the two World Wars,
"recovering the primitive became tantamount to restoring
one s deeper' humanity." This humanitythe inner Cave
Manwas often represented by the libidinous, neurosisfree, naked, pop culture Cave Man, embodied by such as
Tarzan.19 In a variation of this representation, the Flintstones and other cartoons make an essentialist argument:
human naturethat is, modem Western capitalist human
behaviorhas always been the same. Thus, family problems, economic problems, strife and warfare, manners and
mores are eternal human issues. The Cave Man can be
used to defend human nature as eternally the same.
The image can also be turned around to suggest how far
we have come, how advanced we are. We can embrace the
Cave Man's struggles with language, with the natural
world, with other Cave Men in a benign way, seeing him as
a humorous figure. In cartoons and movies he is often portrayed this way: somehow he arrives in the modern world,
where he bumbles with technology, with language, and

with a society beyond his ken. The Cave Man is in effect a

child in an adult world, the evolution of Cave Man to modem human recapitulated as the development from child to
adult; this was a common pop psychology argument, found
in self-help books such as The Caveman Within Us (Fielding 1922). But there is a more malign twist to the primitive,
savage Cave Man from whom we have evolved. His visual
markers can be read as meaning he is outside of civilization, is without morals, is animal-like and threatening. His
link is to a threatening nature. He exists inside us, a lurking
Mr. Hyde. In modem Western society, he is out there in the
world, and menacing: the "wild man" roaming the streets.20
All of these images and histories coexist as we "read"
the hairy Cave Man. Understanding the sources of the image is a small but necessary counterweight to its power.

Notes
Acknowledgements. Thanks to C. Loring Brace. Eric Delson, Linda Jacobs, Alison Jolly, Susan Lees, Michelle Marcus,
Derek Miller, Lois Morris, Holly Pittman. Robert Pollack.
Susan Sidlauskas. Olga Softer, and two anonymous reviewers
for their attentive reading and helpful comments on this paper,
and to my family and friends, especially Gail Reed, for their
support and encouragement. Any errors, of course, remain my
own.
1. Please address correspondence to: Judith C. Bermap,
639 West End Avenue, Apt. 3D, New York, NY 10025.

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299

Figure 8. Charles R. Knight. Cave man of the Neanderthal race. Mural in the Age of Man Hall, American Museum of Natural History, New York,
1921. Neg. no. 39441 A. Photo by A. J. Rota. Courtesy of Department of Library Services, American Museum of Natural History.
2. I use the term Cave Man to denote the constructed image

of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens.

In this paper, and much to my regret, I do not discuss the female version of the Cave Man. Her natural and icono-graphic
history differs in significant ways from that of her male counterpart, and she is worthy of her own excursis. However, as
there is much more available on the visual, literary, and scholarly history of the male Cave Man (!), I use him to establish
certain important lines of inquiry in a limited space. Her history requires a separate paper. The Wild Child is yet another
important subject, with links to stories of feral children.
3. I shall not address the complex issues of dating or human evolution in this paper. This essay treats the hominids of
the Middle Paleolithic in Europe {Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, who date from approximately 230,000-40,000
years ago) and the humans of the Upper Paleolithic (Homo sapiens sapiens, who date from around 40,000 years ago to the
present). H. s. neanderthalensis is popularly termed "Neanderthal"; the term Cro-Magnon was used to denote early H. s.
sapiens. Because the Cave Man image discussed in the course
of this essay often conflates Middle and Upper Paleolithic
hominids, I use the terms Paleolithic and Stone Age to include
both the Middle and Upper Paleolithic unless otherwise specified.
4. At least one new Cave Man movie, cartoon, or television
show has been introduced in almost every year since the end
of World War II. Filmic Cave Men have great range, reflecting their great appeal. Some examples of Cave Man movies
include: science fiction (e.g., The Lost World, 1925; Teenage
Caveman, 1958); drama (The Caveman 1926, with Hedda
Hopper and Myrna Loy); horror (The Neanderthal Man,
1953); musicals (On the Town, 1949, which features "anthropologist" Ann Miller singing "Prehistoric Man" to Cave Man
look-alike Jules Munshin); comedy (everyone from Charlie

Chaplin to the Three Stooges to Ringo Starr as Atouk in Caveman, 1981); adventure (Missing Link, 1988); and anthropological (Quest for Fire, 1981). This survey is based on the
Cave Filmography on the website http://www.banamba.com/
cave/film. Musical references are from Mesolithic Music at
the same link.
5. From the popular song, "Alley Oop," words and music
by Dallas Frazier, 1960. This song was covered by several artists and reached number one in 1960.
6. I write from the point of view of the "West," a term I do
not like to use, as it reduces the enormous complexities and vicissitudes of a variety of European and American cultures
over many centuries to a seemingly simple, monolithic, and
self-conscious entity. The term West creates an Other that is as
misleadingly stereotypical and reductive as the other stereotypes I discuss here. In fact, the experience of the Other is individualeach person determines his/her own definition of
Self and Otherbut this definition is dynamically shaped and
mediated by the historical, social, and cultural context in
which the individual is located (Mason 1990:2; Obeyesekere
1981:13-14). Thus, in the course of this essay, I shall try to
ground my observations in person, time, and space as specifically as possible.
7. The term artist is a bit misleading, as the portrayal of
Cave Men in scientific settings, such as book illustrations and
museum dioramas, was almost always a collaboration between artist and scientist. The work of artists was often and
necessarily bound by the strictures of anthropologists, curators, and other scientific personnel. For example, Charles R.
Knight's hand was guided by Henry Fairfield Osborn and
other members of the American Museum of Natural History
staff (Czerkas and Glut 1982).
8. The Cave Man is also influenced by another figure, that
of the hairy Holy Man. He is also outside of civilization, living

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freely and close to nature. He may have the same hair as that
of the savage Wild Man, but he is his inverse: he is peaceful,
in harmony with nature, and even possessed of holy characteristics (Warner 1995:66). Here, wild hair is a marker of asceticism, of the renunciation of the rules and goals of society,
of purity, of piety, of penance for impurity and impiousness,
and of separation. The sources of this image are found in the
Bible. Both Hebrew priests (Leviticus 21:5) and ascetics
termed "nazirites" had long hair, which was emphatically a
public sign of position and devotion. Conversely, shaven
heads (or having one's head shaved) was an act and sign of
public humiliation (II Samuel 10:4; Isaiah 3:17-24; see also
Milgrom 1996:907; Plaut 1981:1060-1061). The Hebrew root
of the word nazir, meaning to '"set aside,' 'dedicate,' or
'curse'" (Plaut 1981:1058 fn), suggests the duality of the hairy
man as the Holy Man, separated from society because he is
impure and wishes to cleanse himself, and the cursed Wild
Man, removed from society because he is impure and cannot
be cleansed. Christian ascetic monks, or anchorites, followed
that tradition. From the beginning, a set of legends accrued
around the desert monks (Williams 1925, 1926, 1935) and it is
in these legends that the connection between the Holy Man
and the Wild Man can be most closely apprehended. We can
underline the similarities between the Wild Man and Holy
Man: their separation from society, their animal nature, and,
emphatically, their wild hair, which serves as a signifier of
their inner natures. Both images externalize the animality of
the character through their hairiness, as both figures lose their
hairiness as they are redeemed. The Cave Man image is the
product of the Wild Man and the Holy Man. He is also, by
evolutionary retrojection, the source of that animal nature.
9. One may play this game out and think of counterexamples, the elephant, to cite an obvious one. We might also argue
that human hairlessness can be powerful: Michael Jordan
comes to mind. Certainly asceticism is expressed by hairlessness as well as hairiness. Exploring these exceptions is stimulating.
10. Much of the recent work concerns the evolution of
hominid body and brain thermoregulatory systems and their
associations with bipedalism and, later, increased brain size.
Wheeler (1984, 1985; see also Ebling 1985; Kushlan 1985)
has suggested that bipedalism, as well as loss of functional
body hair and the development of eccrine sweat glands and
subcutaneous fat, were early adaptations to the direct solar radiation of open savannah environments. Carrier (1984; see
also Brace 1995:157-159) has argued that the evolutionary
loss of body hair is one of several adaptations that allowed humans to be successful persistence hunters, able to outlast
game. Falk (1990; see also Dean 1990; Wheeler 1990) has discussed the evolutionary evidence for regulation of brain temperature and the consequences of this change for hominid
brain evolution, using fossil evidence for cranial blood flow.
11. Contrast the hairdos of these figures with the description of Neanderthal hair care described by Auel (1981:67-68)
in The Clan of the Cave Bear. The Neanderthal woman shampoos and conditions her own hair as well as that of her newly
adopted "Other" (i.e., Homo sapiens sapiens) daughter.
12. To be clear, the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Human Biology and Evolution also depicts Up-

JUNE 1999

per Paleolithic humans that are clearly not Cave Men. They
are rather well-dressed and tressed.
13. I thank an anonymous reviewer for insight on this
point.
14. For an interesting parallel, see Cecelia Klein's (1995)
study of the transformation of the wild-haired Aztec goddess
Cihuacbatl in colonial Mexico. As Klein (1995:263) notes:
"the European Wild Woman could make herself at home in
colonial Central Mexico precisely because the Aztecs . . . had
expressed their values and concepts in metaphorical terms that
were often remarkably congruent with those of Europe."
15. Note that the influence I am concerned with here is not
just that on science, but on the popular imagination.
16. The data on Knight presented here are based largely on
the biography by Czerkas and Glut (1982). Knight was trained by
George de Forest Brush, who was a noted painter of Native
Americans; indeed, some of Knight's earlier works are fanciful
representations that cross Native Americans with an imagined
"primitive" (Czerkas and Glut 1982:8,22). In the course of his
work at the American Museum of Natural History, Knight
traveled to Paris and saw the work of the French Academic
painters (Czerkas and Glut 1982:8-9). Upon his return to New
York, he started working on murals and exhibits at the museum, painting prehistoric humans in the same "scientific"
style as the French.
17. Knight's influence was quite widespread. His work
was extensively seen in the United States, and he dominated a
whole school of artists, including Zdenek Burian and Jay Matternes. Burian's work (Augusta and Burian 1960) has been
widely disseminated in textbooks and popular pieces. Perhaps
the most familiar is his hairy Cro-Magnon male (Figure 9). He
is a robust, lively man, with somewhat scraggly hair and
beard, dressed in fur and leather, and carrying a toolkit that includes a bow and arrow. Most archaeology textbooks properly
point out Burian's error: the bow and arrow was not used in
Europe for another ten thousand years. This is an excellent example of the influence of the tradition of Wild Man/Noble
Savage on this genre of art: the Cro-Magnon is carrying the
bow and arrows because his referent is the Native American
(but see Mason 1990:117 for an alternative reading of the image). In either case, Burian's image belongs to the realm of the
Wild Man, not in the interpretation of prehistoric data.
18. For example, the recent discovery of evidence for fabric weaving by the residents of an Upper Paleolithic site in the
Czech Republic shows that the heretofore fur-clad Paleolithic
Cave Men wore woven nettle coats (Adovasio et al. 1996).
19. In the 1949 musical On the Town, Ann Miller sings about
her sexy "Prehistoric Man" as having "No repressionhe just
believed in free self-expression." There is also some delightful
wordplay on "bearskin" and "bare skin." The lyrics are by Betty
Comden and Adolf Green, music by Roger Edens.
20. A July 27, 1993, headline in the New York Post reads:
" 'Wild Man' to Go Free Again." The "Wild Man" referred to
was a homeless, mentally ill drug addict named Larry Hogue,
who assaulted and harassed residents of Manhattan's Upper
West Side. A follow-up story several days later (August 2,
1993) characterized other people like Hogue as "wild men."

BERMAN

Figure 9. Zdenek Burian, Cro-Magnon Man (Augusta and Burian

1960: Plate 24). Copyright unknown.

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of Anthropology.

''Rare, intriguing, and highly readable'

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'Tales Arab Women Tell is a rare, intriguing, and highly readable collection of Arab
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